Ian McMIllan: He/him/other

Describing myself as Ian McMillan is a bit odd; it’s the kind of thing politicians or sports people sometimes do, this talking about themselves in the remote third person: “I thought to myself, what would Ian McMillan do?” It sounds strange particularly when it’s me saying it. As long as I’m Ian McMillan of course. And now we’re all confused again.

I think about this kind of thing a lot when I’m reading or writing: whose point of view is the story or the poem being taken from? The easiest thing to say, I suppose is “I get on a bus” and then we all know when we read those words that I got on a bus.

It’s not as simple as that, however. I often read a poem and I assume that the “I” in the poem wandering lonely as a cloud is the poet themselves. As readers, we don’t assume the same in fiction; we don’t think that the person telling the story, the “I”, is the writer, particularly if the novel is set 300 years in the future on the Planet ZargX. We assume that poetry, somehow, is more confessional, is more from the heart so we think that the “I” is the poet. In my poems I’ve experimented with this, writing as a woman or an older man or as an inanimate object. Years ago, when I read a poem out from the point of view of a watering can at a gig (“Rain collected from a barrel/Sprays from my spout”), somebody asked me if I’d got a heavy cold when I wrote it and I had to explain to them that I was just pretending to be a watering can.

Looking at that famous poem of William Wordsworth’s, it would be interesting to imagine different opening lines. We all know the aforementioned “I wandered lonely as a cloud” but what if it was “He wandered lonely as cloud”? Who is the “he”? Why are they wandering? And, perhaps more importantly, who is writing the poem? Who is watching the person wandering lonely? Let’s face it, he can’t have been that lonely if there was somebody else there writing about it!

What if the opening line was “William wandered lonely as a cloud”? or “William Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud”? Then the poem would be like the opening of a story. Short stories often start with the name of the protagonist so that we know who is being written about straight away, so if we put William Wordsworth at the start of the

poem not only do we get some lovely alliteration but we also get the start of some sort of mysterious journey where William is wandering somewhere and we want to know where and why.

On one level this is just a game but on another level it makes me think. And I/he/Ian McMillan think that’s a good idea!